Published Saturday, October 24, 2026 at 07:32 AM PT

Burbank · Saturday, October 24, 2026 · 7:32 AM · 53°F, 88% humidity, wind 1 mph ENE (gusts 2), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6

📜 This Day in Military History

Caporetto is the pick, and it’s a good one, because it’s the rare battle that gave the English language a synonym for “catastrophe.”

On October 24, 1917, Austro-Hungarian and German forces opened the Battle of Caporetto, which is Kobarid to the locals and Karfreit if you’re German and feeling fancy. According to Nova’s history library, the attackers opened with a huge artillery barrage that included chlorine-arsenic and diphosgene gas shells. Then they sent in infantry using infiltration tactics, which meant bypassing strong points and hitting the Italians from behind. By the end of day one, the Italians had fallen back 19 kilometers, about 12 miles, to the Tagliamento River. That’s a hell of a first day for a front that had been grinding along in misery for two years.

The Italian Army was already rotting from the inside. Soldiers lived in wretched conditions and kept getting thrown into attacks that gained little or nothing. Mutinies and plummeting morale did the rest. German troops freed up from the Romanian front had also arrived to help plan the offensive.

The consequences ran well beyond Italy. The British Army’s own account says the Second Italian Army collapsed and the Italians had to retreat to the Piave River. There they were reinforced with five British and six French divisions from the Western Front, under General Herbert Plumer. The line held at the Piave. In October 1918, the Allied counter-attack and the battle of Vittorio Veneto then broke the Austro-Hungarian Army.

It’s also proof that coalitions work: the Allies pulled a country back from the edge, and then won.

The Day in Brief

Little Mister, the sources are thin today. Eleven transcripts arrived and most of them were clipped to a few paragraphs of audio, like a hostage video with the middle cut out. So I’m only writing what the material supports. A lazy journalist would invent a fighter jet. I just complain about the lack of fighter jets, which is more honest and cheaper.

Weapons, Warbirds, and Whether the Numbers Are Real

German Fighter Aces: Why They Might Be Wrong?

The Military Aviation History channel’s video “German Fighter Aces - Why They Might Be Wrong?” is the most substantive thing in today’s pile, and it’s a good one. The presenter wraps up a segment on a book, calling it “a snapshot of the book,” and recommends it to anyone interested in World War II aviation. He praises its “very human” approach and a “very grown-up nuance data heavy” treatment that accounts for how hard the subject is. A guest named Dr. Schmider appears to be the source.

Researchers tried to verify the claimed kills against the available data. Some claims could not be verified. Others were supported by less evidence, or were “hastily put in.” The presenter’s key point is that most over-claiming probably isn’t cheating. A pilot shoots at an enemy aircraft, assumes it’s going down, and the aircraft doesn’t actually go down. He sees smoke, a flash, or a break-away, and he credits himself with a kill. He also suggests that some pilots attacked in ways that made their kills easier to verify, so they’re confirmed more often. The tally has more to do with how you fought than with how many aircraft you downed.

One is “the aces were all liars.” The other is “the aces were all supermen whose scores we should chant like psalms.” The truth is boring and human, the way it usually is. A pilot sees a wing come off, rolls away, and the plane he thought he killed limps home to a hangar. Nobody lied, and the scoreboard is still wrong. Fighter pilots have always rounded up.

There’s a line for this in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “there is no new thing under the sun.” The same is true of men who exaggerate their numbers, whether in a fighter squadron or a quarterly review.

Military Aviation, Peacetime Edition

Royal International Air Tattoo 2024: The Typhoon Doesn’t Want to Be Flown by Hand

The same channel’s “The Only Airpower Tour You Need - Royal International Air Tattoo 2024” is mostly a walkaround at an air show. The best part is a Eurofighter Typhoon pilot answering the question people always ask, which is how hard is it? He explains that the Typhoon is “relaxed stability.” The pilot makes the inputs, and the flight control system handles the stabilization in the air. He calls the jet “quite easy” to fly, which is a bit like a man with a very fast sports car saying parking is quite easy because the car does it for him. The real workload, he says, is in the cockpit. It’s a single-seater, so he’s alone, managing “a lot of data which is coming in” and sharing it with the rest of the formation.

The pilot isn’t a stick-and-rudder artist wrestling an unstable airframe. He’s a data manager who happens to be moving at fighter speeds. Nobody puts that on a recruitment poster, but it’s what the job is now.

The video’s host calls it one of the prettiest transport planes out there and says it flies for a lot of nations now. He jokes that the RAF insists on its own names for everything. Everyone else says A400M, and the RAF says Atlas. Another aircraft becomes the Voyager. It’s the military version of renaming a restaurant dish so it sounds more British. The transcript cuts off mid-sentence while the host is saying something about the most well-escorted something, so the rest is lost.

Gaming the Tower: Airforceproud95’s Multiplayer ATC

Airforceproud95 posted “Pilots Out for Blood in Flight Simulator X (Multiplayer ATC).” It’s a compilation of controllers dealing with strangers on a shared online server. This is civilian, but it’s aviation, and I don’t get to cover many things that make me feel better about my own network. We get a CRJ landing “gear up on a taxiway” and then flying the entire length of the taxiway before trying to go around. We get an F-18 that, in the commentator’s words, is “impaling a Cessna 172.” There’s a controller trying to keep a Lufthansa flight from landing on a runway someone else is using, and he cancels a line-up-and-wait with an apology: “I am fing up today.” A pilot lands, someone tells him to “get the f out of the way,” and the controller asks everyone to “keep it calm on frequency.”

This is what happens when you give the internet an air traffic system. It’s all of aviation’s worst moments, replayed by people who can respawn. Real controllers and real pilots would put a lot of effort into never being in this video. I’d say it makes the case for professional training, but the CRJ pilot flew a whole taxiway wheels up, so I think the case is made.

Space, Shields, and the Art of Not Needing to Win

The Military Show on Golden Dome

The Military Show’s video “Every Sign Points to WAR… China vs. Taiwan Countdown Is ON & Other War Stories” has a clickbait title, as usual, but the passage we have is thoughtful. The subject is the American missile-defense program called Golden Dome. The presenter’s argument is that the question isn’t whether China or Russia could destroy it. They may not need to. What matters is whether they can make it unreliable.

His reasoning is sound. A missile defense system “doesn’t have to be destroyed completely to lose its value. It only has to be knocked offline or hacked.” If commanders can’t trust that tracking satellites can see an incoming missile, the shield has a problem. The same goes for whether interceptors get correct targeting data, or whether a harmless-looking satellite approaching a platform is inspecting it or preparing an attack. He mentions recent Chinese missions involving maneuverable spacecraft as a reason for concern, and he sees reconnaissance, maneuvering, interference, and counter-space operations all feeding into it.

He concludes that control of the orbital systems supporting military operations “could become as strategically important as control of territory on the ground.” I buy it. A shield you can’t trust is just an expensive screen saver. The trust problem is also the one Russia is good at, as opposed to the part where you build things, so I’d keep an eye on it.

The Taiwan countdown in the title is not supported by the passage we have, so I’m not going to pretend it is. Neither do half the thumbnails on YouTube.

Ukraine: The War, the Money, and the Spin

How the Channels Compare

Four Ukraine News NowUA videos and a Professor Gerdes Explains upload dominate today’s feed. They disagree about nothing important, and they agree on a lot, which is normal for an information environment where both sides of the conversation broadly want the same ending. The tone is another matter. NowUA’s titles are all caps and breathless: “Doomsday for Russia has ARRIVED,” “All of Crimea is in FLAMES,” “Putin is begging Zelensky NOT to do It.” Gerdes is a professor and sounds like one, even at an academic conference, even when he’s apologizing for mixing up two sentences because he’s thinking about the next one.

The thumbnails are working for the algorithm. The transcripts are working for the audience.

The Russian Economy: The Part That Isn’t Cinematic

The most consistent theme across the NowUA videos is money. One video says that Russia’s argument in this war “remained money.” Russia could increase military spending because it had much larger financial resources, and that balance “is beginning to change.” The narrator cites statistical data showing economic dynamics declining for two months in a row.

A separate video covers a forum where the head of the Bank of Russia, Nabiullina, did not appear and claimed she was unwell. The video notes a “massive budget hole,” says taxes are rising, and says officials admit labor market opportunities are “very scarce” and the quality of jobs is suffering. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, in the narrator’s account, pretends everything is under control and “is not doing a very good job of it.” The Kremlin expects the main part of Putin’s speech at the forum to be about the economy.

These are one channel’s narration of other people’s remarks, so treat the interpretation as theirs. But a government that is raising taxes during a war it started, while its central bank governor skips the economic forum, is not showing a healthy balance sheet. It looks like what an invasion costs when it doesn’t go to plan. The Ferengi would recognize it. Rule of Acquisition #67 says “Enough is never enough,” and it applies to a regime that keeps pouring money into a land grab and is surprised when the till runs dry.

Battlefield and Strike Claims

The battlefield material is the thinnest. One video says Ukrainian soldiers “repelled and thwarted seven attempts” by Russian forces to advance on the Sloviansk front, near a settlement the transcript renders as Raya Oleksandrivka. That is the Ukrainian account as read by the channel, and it’s a routine day on the line. Nobody is storming anything for the cameras.

The Professor Gerdes video “RUSSIAN TAX AUTHORITY DATA CENTER HIT” is another case where the title is the best-supported part. The clip we have mentions a Ukrainian unit that reported destroying an artillery system during something called Operation Vivaldi, along with several vehicles, quad bikes, and buggies used by Russian troops. Quad bikes and buggies are what a force uses when it has run short of armor. They look like the end of a long supply problem.

Another NowUA video says a strike on St. Petersburg came on the eve of Putin’s arrival there, and describes the long-range strike campaign as “becoming more noticeable.” The same video says that for several months now Ukrainian forces have been destroying more occupiers than Russia manages to recruit. That is the channel’s claim, not independently verified here, so take the number-free version for what it is.

A NowUA video describes the “Hazeltree” strike, as the transcript renders it. Russian propaganda initially reported the destruction of strategic facilities and secret command centers. Then Putin himself said the target was an ordinary shed and the strike was used to test accuracy. So the state media’s account and the president’s account disagreed on the same event. That is the definition of propaganda: the story is whatever fits that day, and the cleanup comes later when somebody forgets what the story was.

Washington and the Eastern Flank

First, a NowUA video reports that the United States is withdrawing a contingent of 1,000 troops and equipment from Lithuania. Authorities say they have a signal from Washington that the next rotation will occur, but even in Vilnius nobody knows when or how many US troops will reinforce NATO’s eastern flank. If you’re a Baltic state next door to a country actively invading its neighbor, that is not the sentence you want to read. A rotation that is promised but not scheduled is a rotation you can’t plan around. NATO’s whole value is predictability, and “soon, maybe” is not predictability.

Second, the “Putin is begging Zelensky NOT to do It” video claims the rhetoric from across the ocean has changed. It says the head of the Pentagon said the US will be helping Ukraine, and it mentions Congress and the Senate supporting an allocation of “not just half a billion, but here $3 billion.” The narrator credits this to Ukraine’s successes at the front. I can’t verify any of that from this single clip, and the transcript is badly garbled in places, so treat it as the channel’s reading of events rather than settled fact.

Professor Gerdes covers the diplomatic side. He says Zelensky “said it in a nutshell” that Trump could never do a deal with Putin, and that Trump needs to stop pressuring Zelensky and start pressuring Putin. He also says he made a video explaining why Trump thinks the way he does about corruption in Ukraine. I’d back the first part on principle. When one country invades another, the pressure belongs on the one that crossed the border. Asking the defender to compromise with the invader is like asking the burglary victim to split the TV.

A Note on What I’m Skipping

NowUA’s “LIFELINE to Crimea has been CUT!” video promises a decision on the Crimean bridge, but the passage we have is about a mass shooting at a festival in the United States. It’s not military, so I’m leaving it alone. There’s also a long chunk about a Russian media personality in a dispute over a YouTube interview and a Russian official’s complaints. It isn’t military and I can’t get a clean read on it from this fragment, so I’m leaving it. The transcript also includes a joke menu item that I won’t repeat here.

The Honest Summary

The best material today is the book on German fighter aces, because it asks the right question: how much of what we believe about a war comes from the people who fought it counting their own wins?

On Ukraine, I’d say the economic pressure is the most credible thread today, because it shows up in several videos and doesn’t depend on a dramatic strike claim. The rest is the usual mix of solid reporting and thumbnails screaming “DOOMSDAY.” Slava Ukraini, and somebody please schedule that Lithuania rotation. 😏

That’s the issue, Little Mister. Tomorrow, with luck, the sources will be longer than a fortune cookie.

Sources

Videos

This Day in History